for people who care about the West

The Sunflower State says a historic no to coal

Southwest Kansas gets little national attention. I
recall a Calvin Trillin story about a small town there on the
parched plains, isolated and insignificant. Yet the town had become
a vital part of the Vietnam War because of its factory, then in
frantic production manufacturing concertina barbed wire. Before
that, Truman Capote made the small town of Holcomb, Kan., notorious
with his book In Cold Blood, about a farm
family, the Clutters, murdered by two drifters.

Now,
Holcomb has become the focal point for our great national and
international debate about energy. Two 700-megawatt coal-fired
electricity power plants proposed there have been denied a
necessary state air permit. The reason: their carbon dioxide
emissions. In a front-page story, the Washington
Post noted that this was the first time in history that a
government agency in the United States cited greenhouse gases in
rejecting a coal plant.

Unlike so many syrupy corporate
pronouncements about "doing the right thing," the Kansas official
who announced the denial was clear about the issue. "It would be
irresponsible," said Rod Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department
of Health and Environment, "to ignore emerging information about
the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to
climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health
if we do nothing."

In the past, our criteria for
evaluating power generation were relatively simple. Electric
utilities, true to the wishes of their consumers, wanted reliable
electrical service at low cost. Coal delivered on both counts. It's
both cheap and plentiful. More than 50 percent of the nation's
electricity is produced by burning coal.

But our criteria
for energy choices are now broadening. "Kansas must take advantage
of renewable energy and conservation as we progress through this
century," said Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. "These additional
coal plants would have moved us in the wrong direction." Even
inside the boardrooms of utilities, there are now admonitions about
a future "carbon-constrained world." The writing is on the wall,
and well-run businesses are now jockeying for position in this
changing world of energy. President George Bush may never have
issued a clarion call for change similar to Jimmy Carter's remarks
on the "moral equivalent of war," but change is happening despite
him.

That's not to say the future is crystal-clear. There
is no one easy alternative to coal. Wind, hydro, biomass and other
power sources will continue to expand. Ground-source heat pumps,
now novelty items, are likely to soon become mainstream, as they
already are in resource-poor Scandinavia. Solar appears poised for
a breakthough. And nuclear is increasingly touted as a powerful
option, although it remains problematic.

The greatest
gains are to be had in wringing greater efficiencies out of
existing supplies. We have done this before, quietly but with large
and lingering successes. The disruptions in oil supplies during the
1970s sparked innovations in energy use that yielded the burgeoning
economy of the last 20 years. We are now going through a similar
retooling, only this time with even greater changes likely, and
even more at stake.

These are exciting times. Our backs
increasingly to the wall, we are discovering that there are new
ways to live, and also new ways of looking at the world.
Electricity and heat don't necessarily have to be imported. We are
re-thinking our infrastructure.

Considering these
changes, I reflect upon the life of my grandfather. He was born in
1890, the year the frontier was declared closed, in a sod house in
northeastern Colorado, in country much like that of Holcomb, Kan.
His family burned cow patties for warmth, rode horses for
transportation and, I suppose, burned coal oil for light. The first
electricity for streetlights was introduced in 1892, in the mining
town of Telluride, Colo., but much of the rural West waited for
decades. Not until the 1940s did my grandparents get electricity.
Soon, they had radios and, in time, television, with Elvis Presley,
the Beatles and all the rest on Ed Sullivan.

Last summer I visited the high prairie where my
grandfather was born. A windmill remains, but today, other
windmills march over the horizon on the bluffs near the Nebraska
border - dozens of them, each nearly 400 feet high. We are
adapting, as people always have. Now it's time to evolve again.
Sometimes it takes a swat from a state regulatory board to wake us
up to the urgent need for innovation.